“One of my character traits was that I was escaping whenever I could. On Saturdays, at first on Sundays, I would escape home – I was in Terezín, and so it was not far away from Štětí, and it was doable. And then we became bolder, and together with one more colleague we would run away on Friday evening and come back in the early morning on Mondays. At that time I was already escaping in order to see my wife, who was doing an internship in Děčín at that time. One ambitious lieutenant started looking for me, asking where I was and why I was not there. They were all telling him: ‘He will return on Monday.’ ‘No, he has to be here now.’ And he got into a jeep and he set out to Děčín to look for me there. Meanwhile, they informed me by telephone and I was back in the barracks earlier, before he was able to arrive there with that Gaz jeep. The lieutenant thus got into big trouble, because he dared to take guards outside of the Terezín district, and he had about twenty days of ‘after duty’ as a result. That means that when his duty was over at four, he had to stay in the barracks until the lights-out. And I got punished by ten days of prison.”
“I also taught the political training of soldiers. The way I did it was that I was reading some detective stories to the boys. Some of them were sleeping, some were listening, and when there was an inspection, somebody would shout and I would shout as well: ‘Stand up, attention!’ All who were sleeping woke up. Only one day, instead of reading I took them to the cinema which we had in the barracks, there was a small cinema room with a screen, and we screened the Vinnetou movie there. But in order to make it more fun, the projector operator played the film backward for us – as if the Indians were running backward, and the villains who were pierced through by spears were now jumping up from the spears. We were laughing so loud that a political education official noticed us and came in. There was trouble, but I got out very nicely, because he himself bore the consequences. He was a major and the commander’s deputy for political affairs, that was the name of his position, and he was supposed to conduct the political education of soldiers personally by himself, and not delegate it to some graduate and thus make his work easier. He was thus scolded in my place and nothing really happened to me.”
“In order to come back to what I said: that the people did not get it for free. When they came to some farm, an inventory of all property and cattle was done, and it all remained there, even furniture, for instance, and household equipment, but those people then had an obligation to pay it off in installments. Well, and those who were not successful in farming, then did not have money to pay it off, and so they stopped paying entirely, and the joining of an unified agricultural cooperative was kind of a deliverance for them. Dad did not join the cooperative, and so they – as people used to say – expropriated us. They took everything from us, they took everything away. They took away all our farming tools, apart from two machines, I think- one was a cutting machine, a horse-drawn machine, and then some rollers, I believe. My father had receipts for these two machines to prove that he had bought them himself and that he paid with his own money. But all the other things… since they had been left behind by the Germans, as they claimed, it was all taken away, including the cattle.”
Václav Herrmann was born in 1944 into a farmers‘ family. After the end of the Second World War the Herrmann family moved to a farm which was left behind by deported Germans in the village Brocno in the Kokořín region. The family then lost the farm in the collectivization process after the communist take over of power. Václav completed studies of agriculture at the college, where, as he says, his admission was merely a matter of coincidence, because the district committee official who was supposed to write an assessment for him happened to be on vacation at that time. Václav did many jobs, but he mostly worked in agriculture.. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 he became involved in politics and he also served as the mayor of the village Žerčice. Václav was very active outside his work as well - he engaged in hunting, amateur theatre, he played in a music band, and in the 1990s he undertook a walk from the Czech Republic to southern France. Even now he enjoys his passion for gardening.
